Compost
Given the bad smell coming from the Comcast affair lingers on, a few more thoughts:
- "More than best effort" is when you drop certain packets during congestion because you think you know better than the users which ones need to get through. You're trying to be clever, and have assumed that those SIP packets are far more important than those Skype ones.
- "Best effort" is when an ISP (i) peers or buys transit to enable all valid routes to be routable, (ii) buys a non-trivial amount of capacity to reach those other networks, (iii) routes the packets unless there's congestion, (iv) drops packets from its internal buffer when there is congestion, and can use any means it likes to do so (including deep packet inspection or tea leaf inspection).
- "Less than best effort" is when your packet is dropped because someone else has paid to have their packet get priority. The ISP hasn't given you as good a treatment as someone else, but you're at least a second class citizen rather than an illegal alien.
- "Poor effort" is when you've been personally picked on because the system isn't stateless. They've decided you've one too many a TCP session going on, or you didn't know "unlimited*" is pronounced "capped".
- "Friggin' useless effort" is when you drop or block traffic simply because you feel like it, for example because you don't like the cost of transiting that packet.
So when you hear an ISP doing "traffic shaping" and "network management", what's really happening?
- The PR department will say that they're doing it for the benefit of the dear users (more than best effort).
- The marketing department won't say anything and let you assume you're getting best effort even if you're not.
- The business development department wishes it could find a client to buy priority access leaving you with less than best effort.
- The network department has implemented poor effort in an attempt to forestall a network upgrade.
- The finance department wants useless effort to stop paying transit fees for expensive routes.
- The legal department isn't saying anything at all because nobody can work out what "fair use" really means.
Being a bit more serious, here's what I think the problem with the network neutrality argument is. You're trying to separate out actions from motivations. As the copyright brigade have discovered with "fair use", this is a hard thing, and not amenable to rule-based or programmatic solutions. Even worse, motivation may be a mixture of all the above fears and desires.
The deepest fear is that somehow money will influence routing algorithms. Well, hun, I've got news for you. Nobody's in this networking game because they like spending their days in windowless frigid data centres. Indeed, the very problem is that the Internet's commercial ecosystem is so poor. When ISPs peer, that boundary is impermeable to the usual market and pricing signals. Building an end-to-end congestion pricing system is near impossible, so nobody is forced to fully internalise the costs of their own actions. The telephony system enables end-to-end traceability and accountability. The Internet does not. It's neither a bug nor a feature, just a fact.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 10:14 AM
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